And, that's doable. You just have to get people asking the question "who does their elected representative work for", "who is financing their campaign", expose the PAC's and their support, get the common people to identify with the common people, and somehow get exceptional people to run for office to represent them. It's got to be a a calling, a fervor, a cultural revolution. And it's not to hard to see it coming. Greed is the universal devil, the identifiable wrong. You've got banking and the OWS, The Longhorn Network and BCS, The NBA and NFL lockouts, Clean Coal, PAC's, Walmart, Robinhood school taxes, Ticketmaster, (I could go on with some effort) Peoples heads are going to assplode. And worldwide, they are killing off the greed purveyors. Killing them and putting them in jail. The dominoes will fall.
That depends upon the people that are doing the killing and whether they are desperate enough to do it. If not, then there will be no killing off of the dominoes, just a reshuffling of the deck. DD
I agree campaign finance is the key and you can be sure the current Supremes and their patrons know it, too. Campaign reform is impossible without a mass movement. With the current S.Ct. it practically or perhaps actually? takes a Constitutional Amendment as the current 5 right wingers would find any meaningful law passed "unconstitutional".
There will be every type of attack and ridicule. It's going to be long and ugly, just like the women's suffrage, civil rights and Viet Nam. We really need some galvanizing charisma.
I saw some of the people protesting here in Austin, it was hilarious, these are just folks out looking for something to do, not honest citizens protesting, they looked like drugged up losers looking for a party. DD
That's you putting your interpretation on their actions. But it is Austin, that's what people there are supposed to do. I'd be disappointed if Leslie didn't have an an OWS sign in his buttcrack. And any effort counts, even half-assed frivolous ones, or ones from shut-ins on obscure basketball BBS's. mass, momentum, longevity, consciousness
Never said it was the same. I said that both were bad PR. A touchdown is not the same as a field goal. Yet, somehow both are ways to score points in football. They are related phenomena that share a characteristic relevant to the topic at hand. The Armed Forces collectively is a popular institution, which is why the fact that the guy was a Marine was played up to begin with. Hating a branch of the Armed Forces (in this case the Marine Corps) is not going to win points with the American public at large in this day and age. This is true. Again, I am not attacking the guy. Other people who believe it is true are attacking the guy for holding that position. If he doesn't in fact hate the Marine Corps, then those people would be wrong. That wouldn't retroactively change their motive for attacking him. Why would it be shame on me and hypocrisy on my part because 1. someone (who is not me) is attacking a guy for hating the USMC, and 2. someone else (who is also not me) thinks Obama is from Kenya? Am I, as someone who generally votes Republican, responsible for ever position every wingnut takes that is in opposition to every leftist cause? Post hoc ergo propter hoc, eh? Actually, that fallacy is not entirely applicable, because the injury WAS a "but for" cause, but not the proximate cause. No one would be attacking him if he had never been born either, but his birth, while a "but for" cause, is also not the proximate cause. I disagree. The people attacking him are not the ones who made him a topic of conversation. One cannot hold up someone as an icon and then disallow all negative discussion of that icon (for whatever reason). This is true, because no one would have made him a representative of the movement if he had not been hit with the canister. He would have been another of the anonymous faces in the crowd. Even so, the attacks are not because he was injured. If the Earth did not exist, no one would care about anything he may or may not have done. Even so, the existence of the earth is not the animus of the attacks. As I covered above, the people attacking him believe the information, which is what informs their motive. If the information is not true, that doesn't magically make their motive that he was injured. I am not attacking him at all. I don't really post much about the OWS movement. The rest of these issues though are addressed above. Basically there are three important things: 1. he has a position that the group attacking him opposes, support for OWS, 2. he is a face of this position, and 3. the people attacking him believe he has an easily assailable position that they can use to undermine him, destroying his effectiveness as 2 and therefor weakening 1. That is the motive for attacking him, not that he was injured. That he was injured merely contributed to 2.
You just hit it man. Wow. How is it that, one, politicians won't sell, and two, the capital Public refuse to buy this simple message of unity? I know the answer is the "class warfare" argument, as explicitly implied and also rhetorically used to proliferate fear and friction, and the Murdoch empire's interests, and all, but my god, it seems like an easy thing to agree on. That we are ALL getting screwed here. How can we not sell the idea that the people in charge are responsible for our environments, in all sense of the word?
Because we all hope and trust that the people in charge are really smart and know what they are doing because we know our neighbors are dumb as a box of rocks. We accept the people who 'assume' authority i.e. the Pope, Alan Greenspan, Dick Cheney, Robert McNamara, Rasputin, Everybody on Wall Street ...Madoff, Colombus. Some get it right and some get it wrong. But people are lazy and scared and always want someone else to save them. I think the answer of course is people have to do hard work (not me) get every piece of information out there, test it, peer review it and try to make the best choices; but they won't so they get exploited by the grifters. I figured this out because of how many times in my field people want me to make their subjective decisions for them saying "you're the expert". Yes I bring you a lot of information but I can't decide for you. If I wanted to, I could just sell them the expensive stuff. It not the people in charge, it's we the people in charge. That's the message, and it is a very hard one to sell.
Earnings Gap Somethings on income inequality. This numbers I am about to show you came from the IRS.gov website's Tax Statistics page. They pertain to adjusted gross income and the total returns. What you are seeing in the left column is the adjusted gross income (AGI) split into ranges (i.e. $1 under, $500,000 under $1,000,000). The right column is made up of the change in percent from IRS's 1996 income tax statistics to the IRS's 2009 income tax statistics. That is to say it is 2009's percent minus 1996's percent and the whole divided by the 1996 percent. For instance, there were 236,883 returns with an adjusted gross income of $1,000,000 or more in 2009 out of nearly 140,000,000 total returns. In 1996 there were 110,912 out of nearly 120,000,000. The change in the percent was about +82%. My two sources: 2009 - http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/09in11si.xls 1996 - http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/96in11si.xls So what the heck are these OWSers (good name for a sports team) saying about income inequality? While it is true that in 2009 10,000,000 new people filed returns$1,000 and under AGI as compared to 1996, there were 11,000,000 fewer people in 2009 filing returns in the $1,000 to under $50,000 range. In 2009, there were 21,000,000 more people filing in the $50,000 and above range. Progress, no?
So far I don't see Fox News ripping on the guy - seems like it really is only bad PR to you and your friends on here. Sounds more like the other team tried to make a cheap hit on the guy but failed. You are attacking the guy... That is an attack. You are when you read their ideology and post it on this BBS as fact. It's still doesn't make sense. You are saying that there is no cause-effect relationship going on here but there is. Olsen became a symbol because he was injured, not merely after it. His being injured is instrumental in what he represents. Had he not been injured at the protest, no one would know his name. If he was injured driving a car drunk - no one would know his name. So there is a direct link to his injury and his status. You are using your latin incorrectly. He's not a political candidate - he's just a kid in a coma. It's really tasteless to attack him while he can't defend himself - especially a vet. He didn't choose to be an icon. he isn't running for political office. He is being attacked only because he's become something meaningful to people and the people attacking him aren't trying to hurt him, they are trying to hurt the people inspired by him with these stories that are not even fit for Fox News. I never claimed their motivation was because he was injured. Their motivation is libel and slander in order to tarnish the left. He's a victim in the political game on both sides. But one is a positive message, and the other is just disgusting.
Mucho props to the police all over the country for dealing with these barbarians. I am not sure I could stomach it. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/P8JdtmHFMMg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/uj0gAOxJFPk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Wouldn't know what is showing on Fox News, not a viewer. That was Commodore's post (#1124 in case you want to check), not mine. Try again. I am a hypocrite when I read their (people attacking a guy for hating the Marine Corps? Birthers?) ideology and posting it as fact? I don't know how either of those things constitute an ideology, but I don't think I posted anything from either source as fact. Nor do I see how doing so would make one a hypocrite. I have no idea what you are alleging I have done. He would not have become a symbol if assembly as a form of expression had never been invented, but people are not attacking him because of the existence of assembly. He would not have become a symbol if he had never been born, but people are not attacking him because he was born. He was made a symbol because of his injury, but the only attacks I have seen (and I have only seen them here) are based on his views, not his injury. He didn't choose to be an icon, that is true. But the people that made him an icon opened him up to scrutiny and criticism. I would prefer he was never made an icon without his consent in the first place. You said he was attacked because he was injured, that implies that the motive was his injury. Otherwise it is as meaningless a statement as, "He was attacked because he was born."
Jeez. After about 1 minute of that I would have tasered the **** out of those psycho's. Don't see how cops do it.
I guess using the same civilized restraint the people have shown by not throwing the mortgage bankers out of their 100th story windows. Their crimes are more egregious. Your entire police budget for the decade including their pension funding can just fall out of a banker's pocket: 9:55 p.m. | Updated Federal regulators have discovered that hundreds of millions of dollars in customer money has gone missing from MF Global in recent days, prompting an investigation into the brokerage firm, which is run by Jon S. Corzine, the former New Jersey governor, several people briefed on the matter said on Monday. The recognition that money was missing scuttled at the 11th hour an agreement to sell a major part of MF Global to a rival brokerage firm. MF Global had staked its survival on completing the deal. Instead, the New York-based firm filed for bankruptcy on Monday. Regulators are examining whether MF Global diverted some customer funds to support its own trades as the firm teetered on the brink of collapse. The discovery that money could not be located might simply reflect sloppy internal controls at MF Global. It is still unclear where the money went. At first, as much as $950 million was believed to be missing, but as the firm sorted through its bankruptcy, that figure fell to less than $700 million by late Monday, the people briefed on the matter said. Additional funds are expected to trickle in over the coming days. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/10...gating-mf-global/?partner=rss&emc=rss&src=igw Yeah, He'a an Obama Democrat. At least the libertarians should be climbing on the OWS train. (politics/bedfellows)
You should move to a country like Iran or Syria that cracks down on civil disobedience. You're probably more suited to that type of environment
How come Americans, even Tallanover, types cheer Egyptians and Chinese and others when they protest their government and can easily see through the various pre-texts used in those countries to arrest, club, tear gas those demonstrators but cheer the brutality when folks protest for their rights here.
I attribute it to a perverse desire to see the people they disagree with, get the **** kicked out of them.
